One of my larger projects back when I ran an engineering firm was to inspect all of the buildings owned and/or occupied by the State of Lousiana for asbestos and lead in water fountains. Part of the contract required us to produce floor plans of all the buildings we inspected because the State, at that time, did not have them. This technology really would have saved the State a lot of money and produced a much better final product too.
A new computer vision system creates 3-D maps of building interiors
Tools
What do you want to do?
I’m building a mind map for my BUS 233 Intro to Business Stats students called “What do you want to do?” Its purpose is to provide them with a logical and quick way to find information on the various statistical
procedures and tests we use in inference. I wanted to build it into this site, but I’m having problems figuring out how to bring in such a complicated page. So until I do figure it out, check out the work-in-progress here: https://cmapscloud.ihmc.us/viewer/cmap/1Q2F2CD3B-1G776QF-597
By the way, I’m using an open-source tool called “CMap” and it is quite good. The organization provides ‘cloud’ space for sharing of your mind-maps and I’m making use of that. Learn more here: http://cmap.ihmc.us/
Data Visualization – a must have
Great article comparing some commercial and open visualization tools: Visualizations: Comparing Tableau, SPSS, R, Excel, Matlab, JS, Python, SAS
Test Jing free screencast app
Update 3-22-2015: the more I use the “golden dot,” the more I like it. I often take static screen shots for one reason or another. In the past, I used Windows Ctrl-PrtScr and then opened Photoshop or Gimp and pasted the image in for editing. But with Jing, the ‘dot’ is always active and all I have to do is click on it, highlight the area on the screen I want, click, do any basic editing I need in Jing, and export or save the completed image. It is much faster and very easy to do.
Background: I thankfully have access to Techsmith’s full-blown Camtasia, but I ran across a fellow teacher who uses the free Jing app to make short (5 min or less) screen casts for her students. I thought I would give it a try and this is my first “project.” [Read more…] about Test Jing free screencast app
Breaking Bad – Good Data
I found two pretty neat sites where the ratings of each of the five years of Breaking Bad episodes were regressed looking for patterns. The first is a bit more exotic and uses a powerful ( and expensive) Excel addin Tabeau. The best graphics are at the bottom of the page: http://www.openbi.com/content/vizualizing-bad-did-breaking-bad-get-better-over-time
This one has a great linear regression plot of each season with CIs: http://www.openbi.com/content/vizualizing-bad-did-breaking-bad-get-better-over-time
This one is similar but perhaps easier to understand; http://www.openbi.com/content/vizualizing-bad-did-breaking-bad-get-better-over-time
Open (Free) Big Data Goodies
It is a bit disheartening to know that the predictive analytics/big data world is moving ahead so quickly just as I am trying to learn how to harness it. But it is also nice to find the many open source data analysis tools – user friendly types – becoming commoditized on the Web of Things. Two came to my attention today: First, a text analysis tool by the data folks at Stanford at http://www.etcml.com/ that among other things can analyze your (or anyone’s) Tweeter feed for positive or negative “feeling.” Second is a neat network analysis/mapping add-in for Excel http://nodexl.codeplex.com/ that I’m going to use to map some learning communities I’m interested in. You should check out their look at politics on Twitter on their website.
I respectfully suggest you “play” with them. 🙂